Originally Posted by
Pilot DAR
.......... If I were to go to the administrator to ask to add a forum for instructor/training tribal knowledge, what would the instructors here like to see?
Could be useful - a sort of "I learned about Instructing from that"!
Like the time I flew a "Trial Lesson" having asked the student (and his wife) why he wanted to have a Trial Lesson - just so you can then tailor your approach to the Lesson to suit the customer. His wife had just bought it for his birthday - as many people do, nothing more. Not a problem. Well, on T/O at about 100-150ft, the student suddenly froze and started hyper-ventilating. Thankfully he let go of the controls but I was going to get back on the ground ASAP - and without using words like "May-day" on the radio - just in case it freaked him out even more! ATC could clearly tell from my tone of voice that I was going to fly a low-level cct ........ no matter what they said!!!!!!!!!!
Having landed, he still couldn't actually speak - so I quizzed his wife who said "Oh, we go abroad quite a lot to visit family - I hate ferries and he hates flying so I thought this might cure him of his fear of flying!". After telling her, in no uncertain terms, that her not mentioning that small factoid to me when I'd asked earlier could have easily killed her husband ..... and me ( I was still quite shaken up myself!!) ....... I used the remaining 0.9 of an hour to take her on the Trial Lesson. She was actually not a bad student pilot and we had a great lesson despite the fact that, earlier, I had been very, very blunt with her once she'd told me why she'd bought him the flight!!!!!!! Oh, and ATC fully understood why I hadn't used words like "May-day" once I had explained what had happened!!!!!!
Originally Posted by
Pilot DAR
... Funny, I have found exactly that! On the bare ice of a frozen lake, in my C 150, I taught my teenage cousin to land in an hour or so. No runway boundaries at all, just endless surface. It was my patter of "pull... pause... pull, pull, pause, pull...." which lead her to understand the nuances of holding it off for a nice landing. I wish I'd been taught that way!........
Back to the slightly less worrying topic of landing ...... I generally avoid using things like "pull... pause... pull, pull, pause, pull....". I feel that could lead to "notchy" pilot inputs when you really just want slowly and smoothly increasing back-pressure to hold off - but without climbing either. You spend ages drumming in the smooth application of controls so "pull... pause... pull..." sort of goes against that. The "hold off" skill is best taught with a ground briefing first, then flying level in upper air exercises as speed bleeds off and then down the runway as speed bleeds off to fine-tune the skill if more practice is needed.
The "I must not land" chant is slightly different. It more breaks the psychological desire to get the aircraft on the deck ASAP which I find is often a problem - you are getting them to remind themselves to use the "hold off" skill longer than they really want to - but they need to have been taught the mechanics of how to "hold off" already. Often, such things are closely related but are subtly different and others may have different approaches!